The Best Part of Virtual Reality Could Be Just Sitting At Your Virtual Desk

Imagine just a tiny tweak to your morning routine. You still roll out of bed in the morning, take a shower, shuffle into the office for work, grab a cup of coffee, and plop down in your chair to start the day. But instead of reaching out to turn on a computer monitor, imagine that you slip on a virtual reality headset. It might not be as far-fetched as you think.

Yes, the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive square their focus on games, games, games. Who else but tech-junky gamers could be expected to shell out $600 or $800 (respectively) for a headset, plus $1,000 for the computer to run it? But while psychedelic space shooters might be fun for a while, what good is VR if you're not locked into a game? It's all about swimming in a sea of virtual screens.

Slap on an Oculus and suddenly you have unlimited monitors.

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For the simplest introduction, let's take the virtual reality Netflix app, which allows a viewer to sit in a virtual living room, watching Netflix on a virtual TV. This may seem sort of frivolous (and it is) until you take the idea further out to its extremes. Why just a living room? The video app built into Samsung's Gear VR will let you watch a movie in a theater on the moon. Still sort of a gimmick, but why stop at a virtual TV? And why stop at just one?

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This is an idea embraced to its fullest by a program boringly called "Virtual Desktop" which performs the simple service of taking the windows that would appear on a normal monitor, and making them float around you. In practice it's more than a little unwieldy, but the potential of a finer-tuned version is obvious.

Second monitor? Ha! Slap on an Oculus and suddenly you have unlimited monitors. One screen for Twitter, one for email, three for web browsing, and two more for TV. It's either heaven or hell, depending on how you feel about multi-tasking.

A company called Envelop VR has raised over $5 million from Google Ventures in order to design similar technology that's a little more intuitive than Virtual Desktop's jank. What's more, gaming giant Valve (also a partner in making the HTC Vive) has gotten in on the action too; the company plans to bring every game in its unfathomably large Steam library to VR through a "desktop theater" mode which would let let users make the most of VR without having to stick to purely VR games. The virtual screen idea has clearly got legs.

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But there are going to need to be a lot of technological advancement before we're all jacking into cyber corner-offices with 50 customizable monitors and a perfect view of the Earth from orbit, or the ocean floor, or whatever else strikes your fancy. For starters, the screens in the upcoming virtual headsets are good, but not quite good enough to replace actual screens.

Both the Oculus and the Vive have high-res screens, sure—2160 x 1200 pixels is nothing to sneeze at—but when they are inches away from your eyes, you start to see the gaps between the pixels. So while they're fine for stylized video game graphics or big flashy movies, they are a nightmare for reading text. In as little as a year or two, however, 4K screens could solve this problem with ease.

There's also the trouble of how you'd interact with this stuff. Mouse and keyboard could work, but you'd be typing blind. And while the Vive has its motion controls the the Oculus will soon have a pair of its own, they don't quite have the accuracy of more traditional devices.

Sitting at your desk with a pair of goggles still seems a little dystopian, no matter what the benefits.

That, and sitting at your desk with a pair of goggles still seems a little dystopian, no matter what the benefits. And that's to say nothing of the potential for eyestrain. Perhaps with augmented reality like the Microsoft Hololens or the mysterious Magic Leap, we could get some of the same advantages without forcing you to block out your whole world and stare at nothing but an all-encompassing screen. But for now, and the near future, that tech is in its infancy.

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Virtual reality's biggest, sexiest selling point right now may be putting you into some other fantastic world where you pilot spaceships or shoot bad guys in slow motion, and if anything can help this a tech that's failed so many times before secure a foothold in popular culture, it's probably flashy demos like these.

Someday, when we finally figure out how to make lifelike avatars maybe we'll all strap on headsets to visit the real-life metaverse that Facebook was clearly imagining when it bought Oculus. Until then, virtual reality's most practical use could be using two screens mounted in front of your eyes to simulate a few dozen floating off in the distance.